No-One Can Hear You Scheme: Mush

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I was on a bus the other day when an old man sneezed, so I know just how the poor people in the newly launched browser multiplayer game Mush musht* feel. They’re humanity’s last, best hope for survival. A 16-person ship traveling through space, fending off attacks, trying keep sane and safe. On top of the typical space trouble is a very particular problem: two of the team members on board have been infected with a deadly spore, and the infected pair will do whatever it takes to turn the people on board into…
… mush. You probably got that, but the suspense is justified. Mush is a nasty, nasty game. Friends and acquaintances can suddenly become raging, monstrous alien shape shifters who are in a confined space with you. While they’re working together, in a private chatroom, the rest of the ship is trying to survive for long enough to unmask the killers.

It’s actually a neat simulation of a spaceship: each character has a specific role, and the ship’s functions break down and need to be prioritised and repaired. With every action on board needing both Action and Movement points, it’s a terrifying balancing act to keep everything in good shape. Particularly while the Mush are lurking.

It’s from the makers of Die2Nite, which Quinns loved. I had a brief play on the beta and forgot to tell everyone how good it was, but it’s going live today so you can totally find out for yourselves.

Weird, I just found out about this somewhere else. I enjoyed the creators’ other game, Die2Nite, for a while before my interest dropped off. I’ve just done one cycle’s worth of wandering around poking stuff. It’s interesting for sure. Getting a pretty hefty “turn-based SS13” vibe off of this.

“This is basically the Battlestar Galactica boardgame in electronic form.”

Very mush so. However, it’s a F2P game, so expect “energy” limits on your actions and premium boni. Important to note that buying their gold mode just once (1 month = ~10 euros) makes your account silver, rather than free-level bronze, permanently – this allows you to access a second character skill each voyage and it frees up an inventory slot (you only have three!).

In the future there will be closed groups where you can play with/against your friends in an accelerated way, with 1 hour cycles for example.

If the cycles were shorter by default, you’d probably miss out on a lot of things while sleeping, but a game would still require at least a whole day from you to finish. So it wouldn’t be feasible.
If it was accelerated in a way that you could finish in a matter of hours, that would certainly make for an interesting ride once or twice, but many of the nuances and intrigues of hunting the enemy amongst you would be lost I think.

Not really seeing the draw for this game. Graphics are about the only interesting thing about it. The 3 hour wait limit between turns killed any interest I had in it. There really isn’t a reason to play this over SS13 which is many leagues above this in everything other than the graphics department (and perhaps responsiveness). Though you’re better off comparing this to some generic Mafia game than SS13 which really seems like a mismatched comparison.

This isn’t supposed to be a real-time game. You log in once per day, or every 30 minutes to check what happened, depending on your activity/obsession level.
There is always something to do, be it an action or just reading/posting messages.

Well, to people like me who live in eastern-european countries and can’t afford to pay for every multiplayer game that sparks their interested, it’s more than worth it, especially now that developers are starting to learn how to do it right (League of Legends, DotA 2, etc.).

I think people are misrepresenting the way turns work in Mush. They aren’t artificial wait periods. The game is semi-real-time since everybody can continuously move and act as long as they have points saved up. The “turns” are just moments in time where events can happen or you get additional action/movement points.
In fact you will rarely have enough points to do something useful each “turn” (or cycle as it’s called).

To me the system is the best I’ve seen in a browser game so far since I’ve only known games where everything is in real-time and you have to check the game constantly or ones where you need like a day or more to take a turn but you ABSOLUTELY need to login at fixed intervals. These games dictate your whole life when you play them and are quite evil, I dare say.

Here you can log in every 9 hours, for instance, when you have gained enough action points to actually do something useful and take one giant turn. Or you can log in constantly and take small turns. And sleeping in real life doesn’t necessarily mean a disadvantage in the game. The only benefit you get from logging in regularly is that you can react to the actions of your crewmates or events that occur between cycles.